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The empty chair on foreign affairs

Richard Fernandez, aka Wretchard, has a devastating critique of the Obama administration’s handling of national security and foreign affairs. Here’s a sample, do read the whole thing.

Pakistan, Iran and North Korea might each be developing components of a nuclear weapons and delivery platform under the diplomatic protection of Russia and China. And suppose terrorism were not simply the product of mutant sects in Islam, but of a concerted effort by secret services, like the ISI, to send proxy enemies against the West?

Such a condition would imply the necessity of a crash program of energy independence to deny the Muslim oil producers their monetary leverage. That situation would call for active ideological warfare against radical Islam and it’s 5th Column: the radical maddrassas.

But the adminstration’s security policies evince no such world view; and in place of any discernible comprehensive strategy the administration offers a patchwork cocktail consisting of ”leading from behind”, windmills, auto scrappage, electric cars powered from oil-fired power plants, encouragement for the ‘Arab Spring’, outreach to Islam, pinprick drone attacks on countries which are nuclear armed! without even the benefit of Congressional authorization. It has pursued an unremitting program of defense cuts and it is now belatedly reviving a missile defense system to defend itself against one of the poorest nations on the face of earth.

However it never answers the question: who is behind the Nokor Nukes and what part does it play in a larger game? But that’s a tinfoil hat question. Everyone knows there is no larger context in which the administration’s should exercise its genius. “Smart adhocracy” — the hearty laugh and round of dance with Ellen de Generes or Oprah Winfrey — will be enough.

Seems to me that the real problem with drones is not that they are being operated against jihadis in Pakistan, but that they are being operated against the American people and our allies at the highest levels of national command authority in Babylon on the Potomac.